Wikipedia & YouTube

From a personal standpoint I have never viewed Wikipedia as being a reliable source of information because of the fact that the information gathered can be changed from seemingly anyone on the web. Coming from high school into college my teachers and professors would forbid me to use this site as a relative appropriate source of information.

With that sticking principle, I’ve always learned to never rely on anything from Wikipedia for educational purposes.  On a personal level, I absolutely love Wikipedia and YouTube. I think these sites are more practical approaches for obtaining a quick source of information at times.

Many times the information that is gained from these popular websites in is fact truthful of some sort, but you must always use caution.

 

More increasingly, it seems that these sites are the “go to” places for many people.

In this day and age, I would say that I might allow my students to use this site interchangeably with another. Meaning, I wouldn’t allow them to obtain information from Wikipedia and YouTube wholly. However, I would allow them to draw information from these sites to an extent. So, if my students found information they thought was useful or suitable to the learning environment, I would ask them to prove these facts by relying on notable fact-finding sites to obtain greater depths of information. More specifically: news sites .org sites and any other .edu sites.

Blogs & Twitter

The three blogs that I have selected are as follows: http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/, http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/ as well as http://theorganizedclassroomblog.com. These three blogs are truly monumental when it comes to exploring the many benefits of how to properly educate your students. They all hold really insightful sources of information.

Blogs

1.  Lisa Nielsen’s “The Innovative Educator “is a blog that seemingly explores and lists effective learning strategies on teaching students the aspects of using social media. More succinctly, it talks about how to implement social media into the classroom. I thought that this blog sort of mirrored what we talked about earlier in the semester about adults getting on board with social media, and more specifically teaching the educators proper ways to use the technology.

2. I also chose the MindShift blog http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift because it adapts fun ways on how to teach students to learn strategies like math, reading and other subjects.  For instance, one of their most recent blogs talked about how guessing games helps students to solve math problems.  I thought to myself…what a unique way of learning. Check out more on that post here: http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/02/how-guessing-games-help-kids-solve-math-problems/

3. The Organized Classroom is an interactive blog where educators gather to share their classroom experiences, and how to make the classroom environment stronger. They list things from Assessing Student Understanding, to Promoting Questions in the Classroom, and Ideas on How to Use a Math Menu.  If you wondering what a “Math Menu” is here is what the blog list as their definition: “It’s a list of choices that students can choose from when they finish their work. (A “menu” of math games and activities.) http://theorganizedclassroomblog.com

Twitter

@ justintarte – Dr. Justin Tarte is a Director of Curriculum & Support Services

@ Randi Weingarten - American Federation of Teachers president

@ drvickip Vicki Phillips - Former teacher, superintendent, secretary of education, and now Director of Education - College Ready at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Wendy Young,LMSW,BCD

@ Kidlutions

Child & Family Therapist/MH consultant. Helping parents, teachers and administrators. Founder of http://kidlutions.com . Co-author of Bloom.

Steve Mesler 

@ SteveMesler

President & CEO @ClassroomChamps, TED-Ed Educator, Speaker, 3xOlympian & Gold Medalist, writer, Gator. #Calgary http://classroomchampions.org  http://about.me/stevemesler

Reflection

This semester definitely getting more acclimated to blogging and the RSS reader has been what I’ve been working on. I did explore Twitter for a brief period of time but then I digressed on my usage. So, now it’s really interesting to immerse myself back onto the platform. Besides Twitter, blogging has been extremely helpful in correlating information that we talk about here on our personal blogs and learning about even suitable information on outside forums and blogs.